Wild Yeast Contamination in Secondary

Hey All,

Its been a while since I posted, but I've come across an issue im not so sure about.

I brewed a breakfast stout back in June which turned out fine in the primary. After about 2 weeks I racked it to the secondary and added oak chips that had been soaked in bourbon for a few weeks. Sounds delicious right?

Anyways, I am fairly certain that the secondary became contaminated with some kind of wild yeast or lacto now that I think about it (I used safale-05, and it did not look like that at all). It chugged along for about 2 months before the yeast/lacto stopped (I wasn't about to throw away the beer!)

After the fermentation stopped I checked the gravity and it came out to about 7% which is about 1% higher than I expected. And the beer actually tastes great!

I bottled the beer 3 weeks ago, but now I just checked it and I'm seeing yeast floaties in the bottles and along the sides of the glass. Which in all my years I have never seen.

I'm wondering if this has happened to anybody else. Will the yeast fall out of suspension eventually?

Thanks guys, I would appreciate any insight.

Yes, one of the things about wild yeast is that they may not have desirable flocculation characteristics. You could try to cold crash it, to see if that causes them to fall out of suspension. Another thing you might try is to GENTLY swirl the carboy--sometimes CO2 will cling to the floaties, and disturbing them a little bit will be sufficient to make the CO2 release so they can fall out.

I figured as much about the flocculation. I guess it just doesn't look great when you see yeasties floating. Tasted fine when I was bottling. I guess I will take taste over esthetics.

I've put a couple of bottles in the fridge to see if the yeast will fall out.

I guess I will report back later to let y'all know how it turned out.

I didnt know about that trick with swirling the carboy. Hopefully I'll never have to try it, but better I know.
Appreciate it!

wow - the same thing happened to me. i brewed a breakfast stout, racked to secondary, and a few months later fermentation restarted. in my case it was partially caused by the amount of headspace in secondary - all that O2 allowed something to take hold. and it also tastes relatively good... interesting, but not amazing. i certainly would have been happier had the infection not taken hold. some floaties did develop on the surface but i filtered them out during racking to the bottling bucket.